I’ve never been much for sneakers. I often visit my neighborhood and surrounding area shoe lockers just to yawn at the same design I saw occupying the shelf four years ago, but in a different colour or with some celebrity or athlete’s name on it. I began to see the error in my ways when I picked up Art & Sole, written and designed by Intercity.

Intercity’s “sneakers” are sports shoes originally intended for basketball, skateboarding or just strolling, elevated to their own subculture by the skateboarding and hip-hop style phenomena. This detailed and up-to-date sneaker art history features oodles of Nikes, as well as other famous labels including Vans, New Balance, and Onitsuka Tiger. Lesser-known labels like Madfoot!, JB Classics and The Quiet Life also make an appearance.

The book is divided into halves: Sneakers & Art looks at collaborations and projects, while Art & Sneakers is composed of sneaker art, publications, exhibitions and toys, all sneaker-themed. Among the toys featured were Swiss design collective +41’s mini chocolate kicks crafted to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Air Force 1 and Takara Tomy’s Nike Transformer dolls, oscillating between toy-shoes and toy-toys.

So by this point you can imagine that this book has a few more tricks to offer than your average sneaker stand. It showed me about 200 pages of shoes and shoe art I’d never seen before. Great. But, what the volume does meaningfully through its pages and pages of sculpture and obscure sneakers is bring out the artfulness in the sneakers themselves; even if, like me, you don’t really care very much about how limited your editions are or whether they are made of chocolate, this book will teach you about who makes these sneakers, and why these everyday masterpieces have become so collectible. And I don’t need to have a room full of runners in Plexiglas backlit cases to appreciate that.

For example, in a handy two-paragraph gloss, I learned about a sneaker I don’t think I’ll easily find in the suburbs, FEIYUE (pronounced stop-living-in-a-bedroom community-with-little-commercial-variety), a name as vague and hard to enunciate as an Ikea cabinet’s. These shoes were actually invented in the 1920s in Shanghai, and were favored by martial artists for their “flexibility and comfort.” French collective Seven Dice designs FEIYUEs, limiting them to only two styles, high and low top. Clearly, these shoes are kind of special.

And that’s the effect of this book. Sneakers with seemingly little material difference to the layman’s eye are given two pages of close-ups, and suddenly they hold their own unique place in a wonderful sneaker gallery. No longer are the shoes simply special or noticeable to those who collect or obsess over them, but even the kitten heel connoisseur is given some insight into why some people go so bonkers over sneakers (the people who do go bonkers over sneakers will probably relish this book for its obscure detail and inspiring objects). That seems to be the art of Intercity, exposing the story and creative value behind something we might never have looked at so closely. Apparently mundane, everyday objects become art. It happened to Greek vases. Why not kicks?

Art and Sole by Nathan Gale (Laurence King Publishers, 2008)
review by Stephanie Herold
photography by Ave Smith

Bonnie English wants to teach you Fashion 101 (minus the student fees and late night study sessions) and she aims to “unravel the complications and contradictions behind stylistic change in order to chart the history of modern fashion.”

A senior lecturer in Art Theory at the Queensland College of Art, English has created a very respectable academic treatment of the last century of fashion. She begins her narrative with Louis XIV, predecessor of metrosexuals everywhere, and extends her analysis into globalized contemporary fashion, with everything from Comme des Garçons to Laura Ashley prints in between. What is most notable about the content of this volume is the way English handles her broad topic; there are some powerful fashion images in this book, but this is no pretty coffee table accessory. English selects unique subjects within fashion for each chapter and zeroes in to prevent a deluge of meaningless and broad historical summaries.

“Swimsuits” by Sonia Delaunay (1928)

Exemplary are musings on Russian Dadaist visual artists and fashion designers Delaunay, Popova, and Stepanova. While they’re not an obvious point of interest within the history of costume, English creates a fashion tradition citing these women as Viktor and Rolf’s Neo-Dadaist forerunners, describing how they brought abstract designs into homes before abstract artists did. In short, English finds specific, and sometimes obscure, moments in dress, and writes her own fashion history canon.

The only real downside of the author’s scholarly style is that her astute dryness might be mistaken for condescension: she writes, “Perfume literally provides a touch of luxury to the mundane life of a middle-class consumer.” Her snooty phrasing is a minor sin, however, considering she pays tribute to the authors and inventors of even the most mundane paraphernalia; apparently my bean bag chair was designed by Gatti, Teodoro, and Paolini in 1968. As well, English makes some impressive connections by ascribing new meaning to common garments. For example, a t-shirt is aligned with “the quest to define ‘self’ amongst postmodernist youth culture.” Chanel is recognized for her methods “to achieve a greater ‘democratization’ of fashion” and Mary Quant’s mini-skirt is indicted as systematically “exclud[ing] older and larger women from being entirely fashionable.”

Mary Quant’s mini-skirts and mod designs.

In A Cultural History of Fashion, English treats fashion as a thoughtful art form. She bases her book on the premise that, “arguably, all fashion is not art, but on occasion it can become art.” It is because of this stance that she can earnestly confront fashion as a deliberate act of design rather than a trendy accident… like jelly sandals. The triumph of the book is its ability to educate people about fashion in broad terms, infusing a renewed curiosity into this sometimes neglected or even dismissed scholarly discipline. I give it an A+.

A Cultural History of Fashion in the 20th Century by Bonnie English (Berg, 2007)
reviewed by Stephanie Herold.

My name is Stef and I am a brand spanking new Wornette of the editorial persuasion. I’m pee-my-culottes excited to be working here and hope to goodness that I can keep all you slick fashion types amused. My personal history is one of a fashion vagabond; wandering through art, aesthetic philosophy and theatrical costume, gradually making my merry way to Worn. In the future, I plan to pursue a master’s degree in costume, collect a meaningful wardrobe, and eat lots of cupcakes. Let’s keep it footloose and fancy free, shall we?

Current Inspirations:

Blog Mode at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
A rich, historical academic blog archive that you can still read through. Blog Mode is also part of a more formal exploration of the world of fashion blogs… which seems to be very fashionable right now (see the freshly unveiled fashion blog themed window display at Holt Renfrew, Bloor Street, Toronto). P.S. The Met’s Costume Institute will also help guide you to consider fashion as art, if you don’t already. That’s my agenda and I’m pushing it.

Tiny’s World
This blog is full of off-the-wall illustrations of ladies wearing imaginative frocks, intermingled with beautiful photos of inspirational clothing… belle, bella, bonita…. This is not a dictatorial fashion blog and that’s the way I like it.

Adventures in Lo-Fi Land
The successor of Fashion, Art and Mess. This blog has a unique dusty pastoral aesthetic. Adventures is less about fashion and trends and more about fashion, art and people. Je l’aime.

Painfully Hip
Fashion forward finds for the weak of wallet. Relatively realistic fashion shots sprinkled with Cheap and Chic tips. The best of editorial spreads are curated lovingly without.

Vive Notes of Vive Magazine
Vive notes is a blog to look out for in the fall. It is currently at summer camp; however, I thought I should mention it here because the accompanying publication shares Worn’s intelligent approach to fashion. Vive.

Collected by Blahnik and lauded by Louboutin, Beth Levine is one of the unsung deisgn heroes of shoe history. The late Levine was a show model whose ideas were stomped on by male footwear execs; in her time “it seemed right that a shoemaker was a man.” So, when she designed shoes for her own label in 1949, it was named Herbert Levine after her husband and business partner. Levine refused to sell uncomfortable shoes for women, testing every pair herself – turning shoes from sadomasochistic tootsie-torture-chambers into hedonistic paraffin-wax-paradises. She goes down in history as the birth mother of the fashion boot and the rhinestone encrusted shoe, as well as one of the many who lays claim to inventing the stiletto. In a seemingly innocuous biography – half of which is pictures of Levine’s work – Verin supports her argument that Levine matters. I bought it. By presenting Levine in all her womanly, pioneering glory, Verin is helping to re-write popular fashion history – and Levine’s role therein.

by Helene Verin (Stewart, Tabori, and Chang)
reviewed by Stephanie Herold (originally published in Worn Fashion Journal Issue 9)
photography by Jessica da Silva